Scarlett Coten is a photographer born in France. After studying at the National School of Photography in Arles, she dedicates herself essentially to personal, long-term projects.

Scarlett is the winner of the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2016 for her project « Mectoub » she worked on from 2012 to 2016, travelling across seven Arab countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon.

Coten’s artistic practice explores the photographic medium in a performative way. Using the portrait to shed light on the power dynamics present between photographers and their models, Coten, staging the photograph, pays attention to the choice of models and the setting. While seemingly naturalist, paying tribute to documentary photography, her photographs are derived from an fabricated moment and are realised with her subjects as a collaboration. This deliberately personal approach, blurring fact and fiction, provokes a troubling truth, that of an authentic and yet totally staged encounter.

Since 2012, by inviting men to pose for her, the artist explores the themes of contemporary masculinity through a unique photographic act. Coten offers an alternative way of looking at the world contributing to a female point of view that overturns the usual codes of representation. In so doing, her work confronts the socially constructed norms surrounding both gender and masculinity, otherness and vulnerability and raises issues both personal and universal, about art, power, gender and identity.

Since 2017, the photographer set foot on a completely new territory for her – The United States, where she extends her exploration of contemporary masculinity in a new chapter: « Plan américain ». A unique overview, through a series of intimate portraits, of today’s America—the America of her encounters with strangers, all American men, who have crossed her path.

Both projects echo each other, exposing the same young generation’s search for identity, and her body of work engages us to rethink the notions of genders beyond our usual cultural and geographic borders by telling the story of discrimination from a positive and unprecedented point of view.